


Bleeding Hearts, And Dry Bones of the Churchyard

by RobinLorin



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Dracula Influence/References, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 11:57:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12581380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobinLorin/pseuds/RobinLorin
Summary: He had awoken when the sun set, hungry.





	Bleeding Hearts, And Dry Bones of the Churchyard

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for canon-level misogyny, vampire lust as a metaphor for rape, an evil guy sex-shaming, and really creepy thoughts about a 14-year-old girl (which Anne was when Rochefort gave her a necklace).

They’d done something to him, in that Spanish dungeon.

He had been wild with fury and pain, descending the stairs of his sanity, falling into a whirlpool of unconsciousness; hanging on with his wrecked fingernails.

Someone had approached him — someone often did, their heavy footsteps clear throughout the ringing silence of the cells (all empty but for him, sometimes he didn’t know if he existed anymore, if the world existed, if nothing but his wrists and the loud heavy manacles on them were real).

This time had been different.

He had tried to fall into his regular escape, that image of Anne which had sustained him throughout so many tortures: her soft young cheeks, the blush in them as her clear eyes met his. Rochefort’s pendant around her neck; the cross cold in his hand now warmed by her breast.

But the picture had been torn from him; his own mind ripping through his daydream, alerting him to the danger. He had tried to ignore the stranger, as he had learned to ignore the others until they would not allow him apathy — the men with their torches and knives and metal — but something in his animal hindbrain had warned him.

He had not realized he was scrabbling at his chains, trying to press himself against the filth-blackened stone behind him, until a hand — a claw, a burning spike — had halted his movement. The inhuman strength in that grip had wrenched Rochefort’s shoulder clear out of its socket, and he had howled; and then a terrible pain in his throat, as if it had been torn out, as a fawn’s rent under the jaws of a wolf.

The dawn had hurt him, then; and as he had keened and thrashed in the daylight, he had been declared a success. They had put him in a box — a coffin, a dead man’s bed — and he had choked on the closeness before realizing that he no longer needed to breathe. He had fought like a wild thing, until, somehow, he had felt the sun slip over the horizon, and his eyes closed and he slept.

He had dreamed of Anne.

Her — his — necklace would be warmed by that lovely neck; the gold pinching delicately at her skin. He imagined lifting the chain to relieve her pain; running his fingers across the golden length, brushing against the soft pulse of her throat. Perhaps she would shiver. Perhaps he would lean down and place a reverent kiss on that heavenly neck — suckle at her throat — bite her ripe flesh and drink the blood as she surrendered herself to him.

He had awoken when the sun set, hungry.

* * *

He still rubbed his neck, as a habit. He would have been choking on a noose if not for his rescuers. He could imagine the chaos if he had not died on the rope; if he had hung, choking and gasping, until the villagers had realized he would not die. He would have escaped, surely; he knew by some instinct (the same that had warned him of the creature approaching, the same that screamed at him now, that fought to escape Rochefort himself) that he was swifter than they, faster than he had ever been before, even as a lad. He was strong, too; and he could smell the villagers’ fear in the sweat dotting their temples.

The Musketeers who had stopped him from taking revenge on the villagers noticed his tic. He drew his hand away from his throat and distracted them with the scar across his chest.

He told them it was a memento of his captivity, and it was so; but he had inflicted it upon himself, one dawn when they had thought him asleep in the coffin they had made a bed for him. He had thought to kill himself. To forever silence his screaming nerves; to finally calm the rage swirling red before his eyes; to unbend his knotted soul. The knife had been one they had used on him before. Once it had sunk deep into his flesh and nicked his bone, but in that pre-dawn light it had barely scraped his skin. He had dug deeper, fury making his cuts sharp and desperate, working the knife into his chest, trying to pierce his heart.

His keepers had found him with the blade lodged deep in his chest, heaving needless breaths around the iron he could feel through his lungs. He had been put back in the box, and suffocated with the rich decaying smell of dark French soil.

The scar remained, no doubt due to the repeated attempts Rochefort made to slice his chest open again following that incident. The flesh beneath retained no damage; with each nightfall it healed itself to newness.

Rochefort’s keepers had been cruel: they had let him live. He had been let out of his coffin and sent into the welcoming arms of the Musketeers. They were eager to believe his scars and hear his stories. Slander against the Spanish was en vogue these days, he gathered. All part of the plan, the wretched plan, the plan seared into his skull with a glance of those red eyes of the monster that had buried him.

The Spanish Musketeer, the one named Aramis, kissed his crucifix. Rochefort’s long years of spying stopped him from recoiling, in an instinctive motion that rose from deep within his wrecked soul; and a strange familiarity urged him to lean forward. He affected disinterest but stared into the dark forest beyond the fire, the image seared into his mind — Anne’s crucifix, Anne’s neck-warmed gold chain, on the throat of a Spaniard.

They put the campfire out and took to their respective bedrolls. Rochefort laid on the forest floor and turned his nose and open mouth to the ground, tasting the earth that had trapped him for so long, here in the open air, beneath the stars. It was another coffin; another trap laid by the Spanish and that red-eyed monster.

He had to bite his fist, trembling all over, to stop himself from burrowing into the soil, like a spirit-child trying to nestle against its mother. He chewed his wrist to the bone.

In the morning, when the Musketeers had risen, none of his bite marks remained; and not even steely-eyed Athos noticed the two spots of blood on Aramis’ collar.

* * *

Marguerite couldn’t sleep.

She had no recollection of her dreams, but they must have woken her in the night; she shook and blinked sleepiness from her eyes as if she had been up all the night, though the Dauphin had slept peacefully until dawn. She fixed her hair with trembling fingers, eyes darting away from her face each time she tried to look — she couldn’t stand that skeleton in the mirror, the plague victim with her mother’s eyes, the echo of the woman Marguerite used to be.

Court was busy today, as usual, and Marguerite let herself relax into the flow of routine. She caught a glimpse of Constance, wearing a new dress and standing next to — Marguerite’s heart pounded — the queen, the adulteress,  _the traitor and Marguerite’s enemy_  —

No, no. What was she thinking? The queen was her sovereign and Marguerite owed her respect to her.

She saw a red glint out of the corner of her eye, and whirled, heart pounding — but it was only a ruby on a lady’s ring. She didn’t know why she’d thought, for a second, that a pair of evil red eyes was watching her from across the room.

* * *

His hand burned when he tried to take Aramis’ — Anne’s — crucifix from Marguerite. He dropped it back into the handkerchief which Marguerite had wrapped around it; and he saw that her palms were also marked, touched by the flames of the holy symbol. The chit was trembling and staring at nothing; he dismissed her harshly and turned to brood over the pendant once more.

Of all the cruelties the Spanish had inflicted upon him; of all the plots and the tortures and the unholy experiments, none were as crushing as this. He could not touch the symbol of his love for Anne.

This wasn’t him. They had done something to him in that prison. The monster in that dungeon had given Rochefort a gift.

Power.

This wasn’t his fault. It was her fault, the little adulteress. She would let any man spread her legs, suck on her neck, lap from her veins.

It was all the doing of the Spanish ( _the Spanish Musketeer kissing the crucifix that should have been Rochefort's to lovingly hold_ ) -- what they’d done to him, what they’d brought forth in his godforsaken soul. The man who had been would never dream of baring the queen’s throat, sucking her dry — but he was not Rochefort anymore, was the slave of his new dreams and imaginings.

To resist would be to deny his true self, for the core of his being had been altered: there was no returning to what he once was; and the seamless quality of the change made it as though his soul had been unchanged, and this dangerous quality had not been thrust upon him, but had been brought forth from whence it had been buried, suffocated by court and manners and expectations, in the deepest part of his soul. T

he monster in the Spanish dungeon had given Rochefort a gift. Not power — not only. The realization that the power had been within him, and needed only the shedding of his human limitations.

It wasn’t Rochefort’s fault that they had chosen him for this grotesque experiment. But he would use it to his advantage, and they would rue the day they caught him and clapped him in chains.

* * *

Marguerite choked back a scream. The unholy lust that had risen in her when she had seen Aramis — it was nothing like the lust of the body which priests and lords said was impure. It was a lust of the blood — a lust for blood.

She wrung her hands, feeling the burn scars where Aramis’ crucifix had touched her.

She sensed that if she continued to live unchecked, she would become that which now terrorized her. She would do abominable things to people she should love. Marguerite sobbed and pressed a hand to her heart. Was her anger due to her foolishness or this evil disease that had gripped her?

She couldn’t stand being like Rochefort. She would not stand for it.

She knew what she had to do, to save her soul and the souls of the queen and Aramis.


End file.
